How to Use and Think about Alignment in D&D

How to Be a Better DM: Dungeon Master Tips for the DM Newbie, the Hobbyist and the Forever DM

Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM. I’m your Host today, Justin Lewis and today, I want to talk about an aspect of D&D that is one-part storytelling prompt, one-part game mechanic, and overall an interesting facet of the game, namely alignment.

We’ve all heard the famous phrase of, “It’s what my character would do.”

Naturally, when someone says that, they are usually trying to justify something stupid, evil, weird, or just wrong that they’ve done. Sometimes they’ll cite their alignment as the main driver of their choice making process. For some reason that never really sat well with me. So today, I want to talk about a couple ways to think about alignment, and hopefully help you determine that you need to choose the way you’re going to look at alignment in your game, because it can radically change how your characters act and how you act towards your characters.

What is Alignment

Before we get into how to use alignment in your games, let’s first figure out what alignment is. Even defining it is going to be difficult because how you define it will also impact how you play with it. So i’m going to try to define it and explain it in a way that is agnostic of the way you choose to play with it.

Let me first start by saying that alignment is an optional mechanic of the game. Nowhere does it say in any rulebook or game module that you need to have alignment. Only certain items have requirements about alignment, and that’s simply for the purpose of attunement. As a DM, you can simply choose to disregard all of that, so if you feel that alignment just gums up the system and makes things harder to play, then great. Alignment is not necessary, though in my opinion, it does make things much more fun.

So in its most basic form, alignment describes your characters position relative to Order and Chaos and relative to Good and Evil. I won’t go too much more in dept quite yet, because I don’t want to affect how you think about alignment before I explain the two ways you can use it in game.

In the first edition of D&D, or really when it was just an add-on to the game Chainmail, there was only the choice between Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic. It was much simpler, but then as things progressed, D&D evolved to have the Chaotic and Lawful spectrum and the Evil and Good Spectrum.

What Purpose does Alignment Serve?

In reality, alignment, just like everything else in the game, only helps move the story along. You can take any mechanic out and still move the story along. So really Alignment is just a plot device in the sense that it’s supposed to theoretically impact how your character develops and the choices they make. In practice though, that becomes very messy. You start asking questions about morality, right and wrong, and to be honest the whole discussion becomes very philosophical.

So let me introduce you to my quandary and how I came to think about alignment.

My Quandary

In my current campaign, my wife’s character found himself stuck in his own mindscape. He had essentially been banned there by a being called Dreamtaker, who I’ve talked about on this podcast before. While in the mindscape, the character, Ransom, encountered an evil little character that inhabits part of his mind named Mtiq. Mtiq is supposed to symbolize the potential every being has to do evil. It’s the potential to become the worst version of ourselves. Well, Ransom had become very lost because the mindscape is a maze, naturally. So this evil Mtiq, offered Ransom a map to the mindscape in exchange for his “Innocence”.

Frustrated with the maze and wanting to get out, Ransom took the deal and escaped the mind-maze, but naturally lost his innocence. As soon as Ransom left the maze, I informed my wife that his alignment was now chaotic-evil.

She was not happy about that.

Since then she’s been asking me about ways she can get her innocence back, but really her question is about whether or not she can change her alignment.

Fast forward a few weeks and my brother-in-law, Drew is in town. He and his wife want to join us for one of our sessions. As chance would have it, my other brother-in-law, Ethan, who has a character in our campaign couldn’t make it that night, so Drew played Ethan’s Character Necro, while Drew’s wife played an NPC.

While playing, Drew decided to split Necro from the party and investigate a dockyard. At the dockyard, Drew had Necro pick a fight with and murder a dockworker. Ethan came back just at that moment and with despair saw what was happening with his character. Now this isn’t the first time Necro has murdered someone, but this time was different in that there weren’t any extenuating circumstances. Necro had just murdered this dockhand in cold blood. I told Ethan, that his alignment had shifted towards evil. He was upset naturally, as his character had been trying to make strides toward being good.

With both of these stories in mind, and the desire for these two players to have their characters to be good, I had an interesting thought cross my mind.

I wondered, “Is alignment prescriptive or descriptive?”

Does your alignment tell you how your character should act, or how they have acted in the past?

I’ve come to the conclusion, that you need to make that decisions because when you explain this to your players, you can then let them make choices moving forward with that in mind. So let’s look at the 3 options that this opens up to you (yes there is a secret 3rd option).

Descriptive

If you choose to let the alignment be descriptive, then it is more of a description of all their past deeds. It has little bearing on what they will do in the future and instead is more of a reputational aspect.

If you choose to play with this method, then I would adopt certain measures that somewhat in the old game Knights of the Old Republic. In that game when you pause the game, you’d see your character standing there with a spectrum and a guage showing how far they are into the light or dark sides. When they are in the light side, they stand tall and are surrounded by light and have an aura of good about them. If they are deep in the dark side, then their eyes have darkened and their face is covered by a permanent scowl. They are surrounded by darkness.

If you use the descriptive method of Alignment, then I would adopt similar attributes and if they make their way to being Chaotic Evil, then people start to perceive and mistrust them. Any persuasion checks that rely on trust or good will will receive disadvantage. On the other hand, any checks involving deception or intimidation should probably get some sort of advantage.

On the flip side, if your character is lawful good, then they should likely be naturally trusted.

Of course, this is simplifying things but you get the general idea. The alignment becomes a list of all the bad things they done or the good things. Over time, people would naturally get a sense of those things just by being around them.

In this method, if someone wants to change their alignment, then they have to consciously do actions over a long period of time to slowly change their alignment.

Prescriptive

The prescriptive method of Alignment is less about what you’ve done and more about what you aspire to be. The distinction is slight, but the big difference is that a character can choose to change their alignment in an instant. Changing alignment would likely require some large emotional experience but it could happen. From that moment, despite shortcomings, the character would try to live up to a certain ideal lifestyle.

From a DM’s perspective, you could reward strenuous attempts with advantage or inspiration and give de-inspiration for actions that go against the alignment.

The Combo

As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, the 3rd option is the combination of the 2. Really, this is closer to how we live in our real lives. We are partly our past and partly our aspirations for the future. If you can handle it, try and combine both of these methods to create a current alignment that correctly reflects the cumulative effect of all the decisions of the past and at the same time allows the character to aspire for different ways of life and try to make their way to that point.

I suppose you could also cut it down into “if you want to change your alignment you have to essentially get a certain number alignment points in this or that direction.” I might implement that as a test with my players, but it is going to be difficult. And why shouldn’t it be. We’re only talking about the concept of good and evil and how to act rightly in a difficult world.

As you go out and play your sessions with your players, I’d encourage you to bring in more and more moral quandaries and questions. Thinking of right and wrong and best and worst decisions is at the very nature of human existence. Your players will enjoy being pushed to think about what they really should do and what effect it will have on their characters. They will also enjoy the opportunity to try and do that in their own life. In that way, D&D becomes much more than a game.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. It was a little different and a lot more philosophical. I’m confident though that thinking about alignment will make your games more interesting. We’ll be back next week for another great episode. Until then, let’s go ahead and roll initiative.

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